Limitations

Designing the base was quite easy. Most of it was functional and served a purpose, however to make it a more pleasing experience Ambri contributed some design ideas. We ended up with a massive floating palace of sorts. The main complex had high towers that produced the shield and held the weapons and also mini matching towers on the underside as well to do the same thing. The walkways were open to the visible sky and the shields held in the atmosphere, in between the walkways would be the native plants that we wanted to keep. In order to maintain the system we would construct habitats for the creatures that lived on the planets that we were replicating below the main complex, this would allow us to try to preserve the native life in case of catastrophe as well as have a natural place to go to and conduct some non-obtrusive studies. It all looked perfect, at least in planning. The unfortunate thing we ran into was that the crystals were not growing back as large anymore. It appeared that our technology was going to be very limited until we could figure out how to create our own crystals or how to replenish the resources they needed in order to grow. I took Evan to the location where the crystals came from, he began immediately trying to figure out how they grew and how we could get them to be replenished and larger. All of our technology in the bases was going to rely on adequate power and to do that we were going to need plenty of crystals to work with.

Unfortunately the numerous probes could find no trace of these crystals growing anywhere else in the universe. They seemed to be completely unique to our habitat. There didn't seem to be any particular material that contributed to their growth, they just seemed to be. Scans showed plenty of fragments being produced in the habitat, they simply had stopped forming into these crystals. We performed deep scans to see if there were more deposits, however nothing turned up. It wasn't until we started asking Ambri about them since she found them first that we started getting an idea of where they came from.

When she had arrived and found the cave there were no crystals, she had used her own forces to produce a little light from the crystals on her body in order to explore but there was nothing of interest. She had slept in the chamber where the crystals came from and after a few days they started to appear, glowing with the same light she had been producing naturally. Something from her had mixed with the fragments to make them stabilize into a crystal form. We weren't about to start doing studies on her however, I remembered all too well what the alien had said about how we weren't that different and I wanted that to change. So instead we began studying the crystals to figure out what exactly triggered them to appear. We at least now had an idea of what to be looking for.